Links for 2022-02-25
“...the armed forces that I lead are more or less powerless.”
― Lt. Gen. Alfons Mais, Germany’s Top Army Commander
Sickle cell: ‘The revolutionary gene-editing treatment that gave me new life’ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-60348497.amp
DeepMind trains agents to use keyboard and mouse commands with pixel and Document Object Model (DOM) observations to control computers, achieving state-of-the-art and human-level mean performance across all tasks on the MiniWob++ benchmark. https://syncedreview.com/2022/02/22/deepmind-podracer-tpu-based-rl-frameworks-deliver-exceptional-performance-at-low-cost-210/
Crypto miners literally bought a coal power plant to exclusively mine crypto (it was going to be decommissioned) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-miners-revive-fossil-fuel-plant-co2-emissions-soared
Essay on long-run religiosity and fertility trends: 1. Mormon TFR is failing fast 2. Israel is a huge outlier 3. Ultraorthodox TFR has stayed high 4. Amish have a real population pyramid https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mDkfEjt64DQEtyAmr/retrospective-on-shall-the-religious-inherit-the-earth
Race Exists: 1. Races tend to have different life outcomes and behaviours in a wide array of things. 2. Racial classifications reflect a genetic reality. https://theuntangler.wordpress.com/2022/02/21/race-exists/
Lectures by Olle Häggström on AI risk and long-term AI safety, part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNJRlx_BeDk and part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aly5VpNi_k0
Added some new questions to my collection https://axisofordinary.substack.com/p/i-have-questions
Reward hacking! Regulatory capture! Goodhart’s Law! And other terrible things https://ar5iv.org/abs/2202.05716
Neural networks can process multiple instances simultaneously as a single mixed input, similar to how radio channels can share bandwidth to carry multiple signals. https://ar5iv.org/abs/2202.09318
Explanatory Learning: Beyond Empiricism in Neural Networks https://ar5iv.org/abs/2201.10222
Believe in technological progress! Make it your religion!